Don't Let Interns Compromise Your Company's Security

Whether you run a big company or a startup, there are lots of good reasons to take on interns. But there are lots of risks too.

If done improperly, introducing a temporary member to your team can create a vulnerability in your security, which could ultimately compromise the whole company.

But this doesn't mean you should avoid interns altogether. Here are 5 steps to follow when taking on interns to ensure no harm comes to your company.

Step 1: Use Myki for Teams

Before an intern even starts, it's important for security to be a top priority at your company.

This means no easy-to-guess passwords like '12345' or 'qwerty', no sticky notes with passwords written on them, and no unlocked devices carelessly left unattended.

What you'll need is Myki for Teams. With Myki, your team will be able to better manage sensitive company data without having to memorize a dozen different passwords. And as an admin, you'll be able to better manage your team's permissions, controlling who has access to what data, right down to when and where they can access it.

Having Myki in place already will make securely integrating an intern into your team a piece of cake.

Step 2: Create a new email address for them

If you're going to be using email to communicate with an intern, share internal links and files with them, or sign them up for certain services, it would probably be a better idea to set up a new company email for them, rather than use their personal email.

This is all for one primary reason: if they are no longer associated with your company, but their personal email gets hacked, they could lead a hacker right to you.

A hacker would not just gain access to all of the intern's personal emails, they'd gain access to all your emails to them too, which could include confidential information and private internal data.

It might be bit of a hassle, but setting up a new email account for an intern could end up saving your entire company in the long run. You can even go the extra mile and use Myki's Password Generator to give it a strong complex password!

Step 3: Share accounts, securely

Myki's Secure Password Sharing feature facilitates this, by allowing you to grant team members access to a certain account, without revealing its password. Neat!

If for some reason an intern requires access to an account that the rest of your team shares, all you'd need to do is grant them access to it through Myki. And when their time with the company is over, all you'd have to do is revoke their access to make sure they can never log into it again.

Step 4: Remove them from any services you signed them up for

Even if you create a brand new email address for your intern, it would still be a good idea to tidy up after they're gone.

In the unlikely event that an intern's work email gets breached, the hacker would have access to more than just their emails. They'd be able to log into any services the intern was signed up for during their time with the company, like Slack or Dropbox, and potentially cause all kinds of chaos.

The solution is fairly simple: when an intern leaves, delete all their accounts. This way, if a hacker somehow manages to break into their email, all they'd find is a dead end, not a jackpot.

But why stop at just deleting accounts...

Step 5: Delete their email

Save any data worth holding on to from their email account and delete it forever.

Keeping it around is a liability, so why take the risk? Even if you mitigate the potential for serious damage, the mere fact that any internal email address could be breached should be cause for alarm.

Suppose that long-abandoned email account somehow gets hacked, and the information within it is enough for a hacker to convincingly impersonate one of your employees and execute a successful spear phishing attack against another one of your employees.

From there, it's only a matter of time before your entire organization gets hit with a ransomware attack, or even worse.

So whether you're wondering how to bring on a new intern without sacrificing your company's security, or just looking to better equip your team against cyberattacks, put your company's safety first, and consider using Myki for Teams.